No one in the small town of Anderson, SC would have guessed that Louis Osteen, a descendant of three generations in the family theater business, would become a chef.  Nor would they have ever anticipated that he would eventually be recognized as the Godfather of Lowcountry cooking.

But in fact, Chef Louis Osteen has been a part of the southern food renaissance from the beginning, helping to elevate the country cooking of coastal Carolina into haute cuisine. You could even credit him with establishing Lowcountry cooking as a tourist draw in Charleston. Indeed Osteen was the first to introduce Lowcountry cooking to restaurant diners.  As southern food historian and cookbook author Damon Fowler noted, "Classical Southern food was founded on English cooking, enriched and nourished by new native ingredients, and transformed in the hands of African cooks." For generations, that food was found only in the kitchens of the Lowcountry and not in its restaurants.

Osteen was the original in Charleston. He started just north of Charleston in Pawleys Island in 1980 and then in 1989 relocated to Louis's Charleston Grill at the Omni Hotel (now Charleston Place).  There he became well known for cooking the cuisine of his childhood, discovering the traditions of the Lowcountry, and proving to naysayers and Yankees alike that southern cooking isn't about mushy overcooked vegetables and fatback. It's about local ingredients and ancient traditions. Nationally, he was credited with securing Lowcountry and Southern cooking a stronghold in the regional American culinary movement that began in the 1970’s and thrived in the 80’s. Esquire magazine identified Osteen as “the premier interpreter of New Southern Cuisine”.
Osteen’s creative, intelligent, and respectful regional southern cuisine has put him in the pantheon of southern chefs, earning him (among other honors) a James Beard Best Chef Southeast in 2004. His menus are elegant and creative with dishes like braised lamb shank, Blue Ridge rainbow trout, chicken-fried duck breast, and a scrumptious interpretation of shrimp and grits, where the grits are formed into a timbale and served with Lowcountry shrimp gravy.

Osteen took regional favorites to new heights and put them in print in his cookbook:  Louis Osteen’s Charleston Cuisine.  In appearances on the TV Food Network, and Discovery Channel Osteen comes across as Southern gentleman with a wonderful sense of humor, the epitome of Southern hospitality. You can meet the unpretentious and genial Osteen and taste his exquisite regional interpretations at either of the restaurants of Nashville’s Hospitality Development Group.  As Corporate Executive Chef for HDG, Osteen reigns over the kitchens at the company’s two restaurants:  Watermark Restaurant, and Fish & Company Restaurant & Raw Bar

His numerous awards include

• James Beard “American Express Best Chef Southeast” 2004
• “One of the Country’s Best New Restaurants”, 2002, 1998, 1990 John Mariani, Esquire Magazine
• National Pork Producer's Council "Celebrated Chefs" National Marketing Tour 2001
• 2004, 2003, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1997 James Beard Foundation nominee:  Best American Chef:  Southeast
• Saveur Magazine’s “100 Favorite Food, Place and Things” 2003
• Selected to participate in Great Chefs Series, Culinary Institute of America
• Selected to deliver the June 2001 commencement address, Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park
• Restaurant & Institution’s Magazine Ivy Award
• Nation’s Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame;
• “Distinguished Restaurant of North America” Award
• Sullivan College “Great American Chef” Award.
• GQ Magazine’s, Golden Dish Award, for one of the ten best dishes of 1994.
• Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence
• Johnson & Wales University “Distinguished Visiting Chef” chair
• Selected to entertain the Prince of Wales during his 1990 visit to Charleston
• Chosen to train the staff of the naval aircraft carrier when they entertained President Clinton and other heads of State during the 50th Commemorative Ceremony of the Normandy Landing in June, 1994
• National spokesperson, National Watermelon Promotion Board
• Guest speaker and instructor, Greenbrier, 1999, 1997
• Guest speaker and instructor, Blackberry Inn, August 2001
• National Pork Producer's Council "Celebrated Chefs" National Marketing Tour 2001
• Gourmet Magazine’s Great American Chef

LOWCOUNTRY COOKING: A BRIEF SYNOPSIS

Lowcountry cuisine is the cooking traditionally associated with the South Carolina Lowcountry and Georgia coast. Geographically it extends from the Coastal Plain of the south from Pawleys Island, southward to the Savannah River, and extends inland about eighty miles to the Fall Line which reveals a dramatic change in flora and fauna.   While it shares features with Southern cooking, its geography, economics, physics, demographics, and culture pushed its culinary identity in a different direction from regions above the fall line. With its rich diversity of seafood from the coastal estuaries, its concentration of wealth in Charleston and Savannah, and a vibrant Caribbean cuisine and African cuisine influence, Lowcountry cooking has strong parallels with New Orleans and Cajun cuisines.

As millions of visitors to Charleston, Savannah, Pawley's Island, and other coastal towns of the South soon learn, the region's cuisine is truly unique to its crops, waters, and history. In the three countries which make up Charleston, the capital of the Lowcountry, there are more than 500,000 acres of wetlands.  The people of the Lowcountry have lived off these waters for more than three centuries, as the great flow of the tide brought in crab, shrimp, oysters, shad and sturgeon to feed and spawn in its grasses.  All these entered the cuisine early on.

The South Carolina Lowcountry with its 10,000 square miles has more plant life than all of Europe in its 10 million.  Indeed the early settlers manipulated this land and took advantage of its waters and tides, planting indigo, cotton and rice on a scale unprecedented. It was rice, then indigo and cotton that built the mansions and necessitated the cheap labor that in turn created the influx of slaves who brought with them the plants and recipes of their native Africa.

John Martin Taylor attests that “nowhere in America did the cooking of master and slave combine as gracefully as it did in the Lowcountry kitchen.”  The traditional recipes of the English and French were peppered with the seasoning of the African cook.  Taylor goes on to say that “It is not European, African, or West Indian dishes specifically that characterize Lowcountry cooking; rather it is the nuances of combination.     Lowcountry cooking is Creole cooking, but it is more heavily influenced by Africans than is the cuisine of Louisiana.” At the same time, the cooking is often more closely akin to the stewpot cooking of West Africa with its benne seeds, okra and eggplant.